Since cigarette smoking has long been suspected and has now been determined to be potentially harmful to the health of humans, numerous alternative cigarette substitute designs have been developed in order to provide a safe alternative and still satiate the habits associated with cigarette smoking. These habits include the addictive properties of nicotine, the hand-mouth or finger-mouth habit, and the taste and smell associated with tobacco. Alternative designs have attempted to avoid the deleterious substances formed during the combustion of tobacco, including carbon monoxide, tar products, aldhydes and hydrocyanic acid.
Numerous products have been produced to attempt to satisfy the nicotine addiction or dependence of tobacco smokers. One such product is chewing gum that provides nicotine at the time of need in an attempt to remove the withdrawal effects from nicotine when a smoker stops. This has been moderately successful in helping smokers break the smoking habit. Another approach employs a nicotine patch whereby nicotine is delivered by the nicotine impregnated patch via a percutaneous passive system. This approach, however, delivers a relatively low level of nicotine estimated to be about 21 milligrams per 24 hours. This also has been only moderately successful in helping individuals break the smoking habit. Both of these approaches also suffer from the deficiency of not satisfying the aforementioned hand-mouth or finger-mouth habit.
Other approaches have utilized pyrolitic and nonpyrolytic methods of delivering drugs, including nicotine vapors, to the user upon demand created by the user's sucking on a mouthpiece of the delivery device. The nonpyrolytic devices include nicotine bearing fibers or filters within cigarette-shaped dispensers that utilize air drawn through by the user to release the drug vapors or entrain powdery particulate matter. Other devices utilize some type of a heating element, such as an electrical resistance heater to vaporize or otherwise release the drug vapors in aerosol form. All of these devices deliver nicotine to the lung and depend upon the passive absorption of the drug into the blood stream. the safety and the efficacy of these systems have not been established.
The commercial gum product available allows a passive absorption of nicotine through mucous membranes when the user chews. However, none of these are effective to permit concentrated supply of the drug by driving the drug, such as nicotine, through the user's membranes quickly and effectively into the user's system.
These problems are solved in the design of the present invention by providing a smokeless iontophoretic cigarette substitute that employs a removable and replaceable mouthpiece that is coated with a nicotine-containing coating that is iontophoretically driven through the mucous membranes of the user's lips into the user's system. The present invention utilizes the efficacy of mucous membrane absorption by actively iontophoretically driving the nicotine through the mucous membrane of the lips, thereby completely bypassing the potentially harmful exposure of the lungs to smoke or other inhalants.